basis e.V. presents Atlas for the Disappeared, the first solo exhibition of Haitian-Canadian artist and filmmaker Miryam Charles. For this exhibition, the artist has revisited her feature film Cette Maison, her short film Tous les jours de mai and the sounds from her short films Drei Atlas and Chanson pour le nouveau monde, weaving them together into a new arrangement. What unfolds are three sonic landscapes that engage with the central themes of her work: the entanglement of mourning, diasporic memory, identity, and exile.
The title Atlas for the Disappeared gestures toward a cartography. Yet what the-se works trace are not fixed routes or stable places, they don’t chart a map on which disappearance and the disappeared can be pinned down. Instead, they follow echoes and resonances, voices and songs, creating spaces for listening. From this act of listening emerges an Atlas for the Disappeared, for those who live under the constant threat of vanishing, and for all whose memories remain absent from or fragmented within the archives.
Cette Maison and Tous les jours de mai stand at the thresholds of the exhibition, functioning both as its beginning and its end. These two works engage with loss and mourning. They turn toward the lived experiences of Afro-Caribbean com-munities in the diaspora, asking how mourning can become inhabitable. Moving through the exhibition feels like a procession, accompanied by the voices of the disappeared and of those who grieve. The works keep mourning alive, not as something to be resolved, but as a space where moments of community and imagination can take form.
Rather than surveying from a distance, the works move in close. Right into a fabric of memories, critical fabulations and collected sounds. They inhabit thresholds that lie between places and languages. Within these thresholds, gaps and ruptures come into view, the very fractures that hegemonic and colonial narratives work to conceal.
To accompany the works, Charles has written her own poems. They invite en-counters that resist singular meaning or full transparency, allowing other ways of relating to emerge. Visitors are invited to listen, to dwell, and to build connec-tions with the works that move beyond translation.
This publication continues that polyphonic gesture. Alongside Charles’s poems, it gathers essays and notes by Karina Griffith, Feven Haile, E.N. Mirembe and Lukas Picard.
